Papers in the Biological Sciences

 

Date of this Version

1-14-2010

Citation

Nature 463 (January 14, 2010), pp. 223-226; doi: 10.1038/nature08655

Comments

Copyright © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. Used by permission.

Abstract

Avian brood parasites and their hosts provide model systems for investigating links between recognition, learning, and their fitness consequences. One major evolutionary puzzle has continued to capture the attention of naturalists for centuries: why do hosts of brood parasites generally fail to recognize parasitic offspring after they have hatched from the egg, even when the host and parasitic chicks differ to almost comic degrees? One prominent theory to explain this pattern proposes that the costs of mistakenly learning to recognize the wrong offspring make recognition maladaptive. Here we show that American coots, Fulica americana, can recognize and reject parasitic chicks in their brood by using learned cues, despite the fact that the hosts and the brood parasites are of the same species. A series of chick cross-fostering experiments confirm that coots use first-hatched chicks in a brood as referents to learn to recognize their own chicks and then discriminate against later-hatched parasitic chicks in the same brood. When experimentally provided with the wrong reference chicks, coots can be induced to discriminate against their own offspring, confirming that the learning errors proposed by theory can exist. However, learning based on hatching order is reliable in naturally parasitized coot nests because host eggs hatch predictably ahead of parasite eggs. Conversely, a lack of reliable information may help to explain why the evolution of chick recognition is not more common in hosts of most interspecific brood parasites.

Includes Supplementary Information.

5 Supplementary Video files are attached (below) as Additional files.

Shizuka NATURE 2010 Coots use hatch order VIDEO 1.mov (3407 kB)
Parent coot “touseling” its chick

Shizuka NATURE 2010 Coots use hatch order VIDEO 2.mov (5797 kB)
Infanticidal parental aggression by an adult male coot

Shizuka NATURE 2010 Coots use hatch order VIDEO 3.mov (5297 kB)
Adult female coot attacking an experimental foreign chick

Shizuka NATURE 2010 Coots use hatch order VIDEO 4.mov (4301 kB)
Parental aggression by an adult female coot towards its own chick

Shizuka NATURE 2010 Coots use hatch order VIDEO 5.mov (5583 kB)
Adult female coot at a Foreign First Experimental nest pecking several chicks during a brooding session

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